Episodes
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The Parable of the Talents: A Call to Justice, Not Capitalism
Matthew 25:14-30 From a justice perspective, multiplying our resources means recognizing that what we have is not simply for our own benefit. Our abilities, education, financial resources, influence, opportunities, creativity, time, and access to power can all become instruments for building a…
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When Justice Takes Too Long
Matthew 25:1-13 Our story this week confronts us with the seriousness of missed opportunities. There are consequences when we fail to prepare for what matters. The call to watchfulness in our reading this week is not an invitation to wait anxiously for the end of the world. Instead, it can be...
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When Leadership Becomes Self Serving
Matthew 23:1-12 A socially just understanding of Jesus’ teaching recognizes that compassion must involve more than expressing sympathy for people who suffer. Compassion requires participation. It means helping to carry burdens, sharing resources, challenging unfair arrangements, and transforming...
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Questioning Our Confession
Matthew 22:34-46 In our reading this week, Jesus contrasts rulers who dominate others and service. The gospels do not measure leadership by the ability to command, accumulate wealth, or maintain control. They measure it by a willingness to serve, to give, and to place the well-being of others...
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Render Unto Caesar
Matthew 22:15-22 These words also challenge those who use religion to protect political power. Jesus’ opponents attempt to force him into a choice between religious faithfulness and political compliance. Instead, Jesus distinguishes what belongs to Caesar from what belongs to God. Money may...
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A Wedding Banquet and Participating in Justice
Matthew 22:1-14 Our reading this week invites us to examine what happens when those with privilege refuse an invitation to shared abundance and respond violently when challenged. Jesus’ kingdom challenges societies organized around exclusion, accumulation, and domination. The question is…
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Who Owns the Vineyard? Jesus and the Politics of Justice
Matthew 21:33-46 Socially and politically, this is a story about what happens when people who hold power become accountable to no one. They can begin to believe that their position gives them the right to control the resources, determine who benefits from them, and silence anyone who challenges...
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Actions Over Words
Matthew 21:23-32 This story therefore warns against a faith that is satisfied with correct language, public declarations, performance, religious credentials, or moral reputation as ends in themselves. Justice requires more than saying the right things. It also requires actual choices in direction...
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The Last Shall Be First
Matthew 20:1-16 Throughout history, human communities have experimented with economic arrangements that challenge the idea that justice requires everyone to receive the same amount or that everyone should simply compete for resources. Although few historical societies perfectly embodied the...
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Liberation Shared
Matthew 18:21-34 The story challenges the idea that forgiveness means allowing injustice to continue. The servant who refuses mercy is held accountable because forgiveness does not erase the responsibility to confront exploitation. Indeed, as the story suggests, mercy and accountability belong...
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Working Together for Liberation and Justice
Matthew 18:15-20 Our reading this week presents collective justice as a process: confrontation before condemnation, testimony before accusation, community discernment before exclusion, and restoration before revenge. It challenges both individuals and institutions to resist the easy satisfactions...
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When Solidarity Comes with a Personal Cost
Matthew 16:21-28 The question has to be asked, “At what cost? What kind of person am I becoming?” This week’s reading points toward the deepest center of human identity, conscience, compassion, and relationship with others. To forfeit one’s soul is to lose the capacity to recognize another…
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Peter’s Confession and the Hope of Just World
Matthew 16:13-20 We can understand our reading this week as a call to create a community committed to justice rather than an institution built on power and domination. In Matthew's Gospel, the ekklesia (translated church) is not primarily a building or hierarchy but an community of people...
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Learning to Learn From a Canaanite Woman
Matthew 15:10-28 A disability-informed reading invites interpreters to distinguish between the intended target of Jesus’ criticism, the leaders whom he believed were misleading others, and the metaphor he employs to express that criticism. Modern readers need not perpetuate the equation of...
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Walking on the Sea of Galilee and Standing Up to Injustice
Matthew 14:22-33 Jesus’ act of walking on the water carries more than mere theological significance. It also communicated profound political and social meaning to Jesus followers in the time it was written. Under the rule of Herod Antipas, the Sea of Galilee had become the center of an…
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Justice Lessons from the Feeding of the Five Thousand
Matthew 14:13-21 Faithful engagement in justice requires balancing action with recovery. Those who advocate for the poor, challenge injustice, or comfort victims of violence also need spaces for prayer, mourning, contemplation, and renewal. Our story this week shows that grief over injustice and...
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Parables of Justice, Compassion, and Inclusion
Matthew 13:31-33, 44-52 These parables represent the wisdom of communities gone before us, while encouraging fresh understanding that we can bring to our world now: to apply the principles of the gospels in ways that promote justice, mercy, and inclusion today. We can courageously address...
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Parables that Harm
Matthew 13:24-30, 36-43 Throughout history, societies have repeatedly identified groups of people as "weeds" that threaten the health of the whole community. Ethnic minorities, immigrants, religious dissenters, political opponents, LGBTQ people, people with disabilities, and countless others have...
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Justice Lessons of the Sower and the Seed
Matthew 13:1-9, 18-23 Throughout Matthew's Gospel, understanding the kingdom means recognizing the Divine’s desire for a world where the hungry are fed, the excluded are welcomed, the oppressed are liberated, and relationships are restored. Good soil is therefore not simply a receptive heart but...
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Society as Children in a Market and Societal Rest
Matthew 11:16-19, 25-30 Our passage this week eminds us that Jesus’ vision was not one of endless exhaustion, competition, and hierarchy. Jesus challenged systems that place unbearable burdens on vulnerable people while privileging the powerful. His call invites communities to create conditions...
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Welcoming Prophets and the Justice Implications of a Cup of Cold Water
Matthew 10:40-42 In this context, the “little ones” are those who possess little social power, little wealth, and little protection. They are people whose dignity and worth are often overlooked. For communities committed to following Jesus, the final portion of our reading this week is a call to...
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The Cost of Compassion
Matthew 10:24-39 Our passage this week is a warning against allowing loyalty to tribe, nation, class, or family to override loyalty to the ethics of justice and compassion. Throughout history, movements for abolition, civil rights, labor rights, LGBTQ rights, and peace have often divided…
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The Harvest Is Great, the Laborers Few
Matthew 9:35-10:8 This passage also teaches that justice requires action, not mere sympathy. Jesus doesn't simply feel sorry for the crowds around him. He heals their diseases, restores marginalized people to community life, and commissions disciples to continue the work. The vision of justice in...
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A Tax Collector, A Marginalized Woman, and A Sleeping Girl
Matthew 9:9-13, 18-26 These stories also speaks powerfully to us, today. Many people still live at the edges of society because of illness, poverty, gender, disability, race, orientation, or stigma. Our passage reminds readers that justice is not merely charity or private compassion. Justice...
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The Great Commission, Doubt, and Post-Colonialism
Matthew 28:16-20 Recovering Matthew’s commission from its colonial misuse requires repentance, listening to marginalized voices, and separating the message of Jesus from the history of empire that too often claimed to speak in his name. A healthy, life-giving understanding of the Great Commission...
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Lessons from Pentecost
Acts 2:1-21 The Pentecost story reveals that the Spirit of God is not confined to the powerful, the privileged, or the religious or political elite. People from many nations hear the good news in their own languages, and the Spirit breaks barriers of culture, class, and exclusion. In Acts, this...
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Luke’s Ascension Story and Our Justice Work Today
Luke 24:44-53 Change may arise from the margins, as Matthew suggests, where new possibilities are imagined from entrenched power. At the same time, as Luke presents, transformation can also engage the center, reshaping unjust systems from within before extending outward. The early Jesus movement,...
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The Promise of the Holy Spirit
John 14:15-21 Our reading also challenges performative or superficial approaches to justice. It is not enough to claim love or alignment with a cause. The call is to sustained, faithful action. Love that keeps commandments is persistent, even when the work is difficult, slow, or costly. It…
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Justice Lessons from the Gospel of John
John 14:1-14 Our imagery this week offers a vision of radical belonging. In a world structured by exclusion, where systems determine who is in and who is out, this imagery disrupts scarcity and hierarchy. There is room, not just for some but for many. Jesus says, “Many rooms.” For Jesus followers...
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The Imagery of a Good Shepherd
John 10:1-10 As Christianity moved from the margins to the center of power, particularly after Constantine the Great legalized it in the fourth century and it align with the Roman Empire, the dominant imagery of Jesus began to shift. The cross, once a symbol of state terror and execution, became...
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The Road We Walk When Our Hopes Have Been Deeply Disappointed
Luke 24:13-35 Our story this week speaks powerfully into our own lived experiences in justice work because it refuses to deny despair. The disciples are not portrayed as faithless for their sorrow; they are honest. They had hoped for a different outcome, and instead they witnessed state violence,...
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When Doubt Leads to a More Tangible Experience
John 20:19-31 Thomas offers an important lesson for us: authentic faith does not require suppressing questions or ignoring evidence. In Christian movements for justice especially, people are often confronted with competing narratives, misinformation, and systems that obscure truth. Like Thomas…
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The Resurrection and Our Hope for Liberation
Matthew 28:1-10 Ultimately, Easter invites us to live differently, to embody resurrection in our daily lives, and to practice compassion, pursue equity and equality, and confront injustice with courage. The empty tomb is more than something to “believe in” in the sense of belonging to a creed; it...
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Justice Lessons from the Final Scenes of the Gospel Stories
Matthew 26:14-27:66 Our reading this week offers profound lessons for justice work today. Beyond the theological significance that so many have derived from the story of Jesus’ arrest, trial, crucifixion and resurrection, this story also highlights the dynamics of power, oppression, and systemic...
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A Story of Hope for our Present Moment
John 11:1-45 The command Jesus gives at the tomb in our reading is also significant. Although Jesus calls Lazarus out of the grave, he then tells the surrounding community, “Unbind him, and let him go.” In our reading this week, Lazarus emerges alive, but still wrapped in the burial cloths. It is...
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Justice Lessons From Being Expelled
John 9:1-41 This week’s reading presents to us a story of standing up to the status quo and the risks involved in standing with the marginalized when doing so contradicts religious and political institutions. This kind of action is not abstract sentiment. It is costly. It demands we move from...
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Justice Lessons at the Well
John 4:5-42 Jesus’ words echo all the way down to us today and affirm us as we challenge systems that restrict access based on race, gender, class, sexual orientation, and religious gatekeeping today. If what Jesus said is true about access to God, it should also lead us to challenge systems that...
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Nicodemus Visits Jesus
John 3:1-17 Even though Nicodemus is coming to him “at night” as an attempt to save his privilege and status, Jesus knows that it is not possible for Nicodemus to tell the truth without reprisals. Allyship for Nicodemus will cost him something, and this helps us interpret Jesus’ language about...
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The Temptations of Jesus and Our Justice Work Today
Matthew 4:1-11 This year’s season of Lent begins with Matthew’s version of Jesus’ temptations. Matthew’s version reminds us that the story of the temptations of Jesus is not about a private spiritual test for Jesus. The story portrays a confrontation with systems of power, scarcity, and…
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Justice Lessons from the Transfiguration
Matthew 17:1-9 For Matthew’s audience, following Jesus meant stepping into a living tradition of liberation and prophetic courage that stretches back through Moses and Elijah and continues in our social justice work today. In the Hebrew Scriptures, Moses represented God’s decisive intervention on...
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Extra: Tribulation Survival Guide: How To Stay Alive When Everything Else Is Dead with Stuart Delony
In this episode we interview Stuart Delony as he shares about his recent satirical book The Tribulation Survival Guide: How To Stay Alive When Everything Else Is Dead. For more go to renewedheartministries.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
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Salt, Light, a City on a Hill and a Justice Oriented Faith
Matthew 5:13-20 Today, Jesus’ words caution against forms of Christianity that dismiss social responsibility in favor of spiritualized belief or personal salvation alone. They also challenge movements that appeal to “biblical values” while ignoring the prophetic demand for justice. Faithfulness…
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The Beatitudes in the Context of Social Justice
Matthew 5:1-12 To follow the Jesus of the Beatitudes today is to embrace a faith rooted in justice, compassion, and solidarity with those on the margins. The Beatitudes bless the poor, the grieving, the meek, the peacemakers, and those who hunger for justice, revealing a God who stands with the...
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Following the Way of Love and Justice in this New Year
John 1:29-42 Jesus’ ministry emerged out of the movement John the Baptist started, and carried forward its core conviction: faithfulness to God is expressed through concrete love for others. So Jesus did not appear in a religious vacuum. He began his public life by aligning himself with John’s...
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Another World is Possible
Matthew 4:12-23 Where the assurance-of-heaven gospel often emphasizes individual belief, Jesus emphasizes collective or societal transformation. He calls for repentance not as private guilt management, but as a turning away from participation in unjust systems. “Good news to the poor,” “release…
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Jesus’ Baptism as Alignment with a Movement for Justice
Matthew 3:13-17 Jesus’ baptism by John signifies his identification with John’s vision. Rather than distancing himself from John, Jesus begins his ministry proclaiming the same kingdom message as John did, and he gathers a community shaped by similar ethical demands. Jesus expands John’s work by...
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New Beginnings and Our Justice Work Today
John 1:10-18 “These narratives proclaim that life, justice, and love outlast injustice and empire. In this sense, the Jesus story is God’s refusal to validate systems that oppress and do harm. The gospels affirm that the way of Jesus was solidarity with the oppressed, resistance to injustice, and...
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Christmas as Critique of Complicity with Empire
Matthew 1:18-25 “Our culture’s naturalistic worldview means that what catches our attention is the scientific impossibility of a virgin birth, and this has distracted us from the political point that the author of Matthew’s gospel is making. That political point has parallels in our time. In the...
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Advent as Good News for the Marginalized
Matthew 11:2-11 Advent rituals remind and call us, like John’s preaching of old, to return to the social justice practices of our various faith traditions, and to renew our commitments to shaping our present world into a just, safe, compassionate home for us all. John chose a radically different...
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Clearing a Path for Justice
Matthew 3:1-12 For us today, this invitation challenges us to examine the uneven roads in our own world—spaces where poverty, racial and gender based injustice, LGBTQ discrimination, environmental harm, and economic inequality bend the path away from God’s vision. To “make his paths straight” is…
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About this show
A podcast where we talk about the intersection of faith and social justice, and what a first-century, Jewish, prophet of the poor from Galilee offers us today in our work of love, compassion and justice.
Hosted by
Herb Montgomery
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